I would like to start visually editing more than just the title screen and I've done some color swap work on the Princess during the introduction, but I'd like to start color swapping the Prince. My question, which might be more appropriately asked in a GIMP forum, is if there is a simple way to edit all of the Prince files without having to individually modify every frame? I've tried creating a custom palette and un-indexing then re-indexing a frame with the new palette, but the colors don't get assigned properly.

The second part to my question is in regards to the guard palettes. The guard image files are grey scale so I'm assuming that's a template and the palettes (.pal files) are referenced to assign the guards' colors in-game. Do I just create a custom palette and replace the existing .pal files? If so, how do I know which colors will be assigned to which parts of the guards? Any help is greatly appreciated.

PretzelGalaxian wrote:I would like to start visually editing more than just the title screen and I've done some color swap work on the Princess during the introduction, but I'd like to start color swapping the Prince. My question, which might be more appropriately asked in a GIMP forum, is if there is a simple way to edit all of the Prince files without having to individually modify every frame? I've tried creating a custom palette and un-indexing then re-indexing a frame with the new palette, but the colors don't get assigned properly.

The second part to my question is in regards to the guard palettes. The guard image files are grey scale so I'm assuming that's a template and the palettes (.pal files) are referenced to assign the guards' colors in-game. Do I just create a custom palette and replace the existing .pal files? If so, how do I know which colors will be assigned to which parts of the guards? Any help is greatly appreciated.

I'm wondering this as well. Maybe one option for editing bitmap images in bulk would be to somehow stitch all the frames into one image, do the color swap on that, then split the image into the original separate frames again.
Note that in Prince of Persia's .DAT files, all images make use of shared palettes, which are stored separately from the images themselves. So yeah, the grayscale guard images indeed reflect the way images are handled in the DOS version: SDLPoP can use the .pal file to determine the colors for the guards. (although in the past at least this has not worked well on Mac OS X due to some issue with SDL2, which is the reason that the GUARD.DAT, GUARD1.DAT and GUARD2.DAT files are also included with SDLPoP in the data directory, as a workaround. These are actually used instead of the PNG files!)

Maybe the simplest solution is to just use PR to create custom versions of the .DAT files with edited palettes.

Falcury wrote:One program that I know of, that can view and edit .pal files is Palette Suite. (Windows-only)

This seems very useful for editing things that rely on .pal files like the guard colors so thank you very much. Stitching together all the images does seem like a possibility, but I'll have to do some research to figure out the best way to go about that. I really appreciate these suggestions!

Norbert wrote:Every 'how to I do ... to multiple images at once' can be answered with "ImageMagick".
There's so much it can do. Probably has lots of palette modification/applying functions.

I opened this program and then realized that you have to do all the work from a command line and that is NOT my forte so for now I'll work around it. Maybe if I really can't figure anything else out I can begin learning how to use this, but it'll be a lot of effort. Thanks for the advice as always!